Sunday, October 17, 2004

REVISING/SUBMITTING

This week, have been going through unpublished work, revising. Cutting out excess. Tightening. Changing words. Finding redundancies that previously seemed integral. Always the struggle of sound and sense: what may sound good causes us to overlook whether it makes sense, or can be read in unintended, detracting senses… Or on a more subtle level, one poem began well, even ended well, giving a sense of formal completion -- but somewhere along the way evaded the point, bifurcating into a clever word game (successful, perhaps, as a wordgame, but word game nevertheless) rather than drawing upon and developing the central feeling that brought out those strongest beginning lines. Emerging from all this: a greater sense of solidity, as the words - every word - is sharpened and considered… but when is the poem ever truly solid? There have been plenty of occasions of delusion along the way. The language is a palette of a million colours, and the colours of the poem can be changed instantly. (Much easier than say on a canvas…) That's the difficulty … but also the beauty & delight….All this of course occasioned by the desire to send more work out, even a sense of pressure, as it's already mid-October, and I have very little out there…. and finding in the last few months that almost everything recent I planned to send has been marked with changes, strikeouts, etc. (a lot more than even I had realized). So it's really not ready. Ostensible reasons may be visibility, a growing list of credentials, etc. But in the meantime, sending out has at least one benefit: I am guaranteeing myself at least one more attentive reader … namely, myself.

2 comments:

I'm really awful about sending work out and then revising it later, even after it's been accepted. I'm getting better about it, though. I used to be unable to recognize when a poem was really "finished," but now I think I have more faith in them.

You think! Ha ha ha... I've been thinking so too. But we shouldn't be so hard on ourselves. I've seen many a book where the credits said something to the effect that "versions of these poems have appeared in such and such a review." Reviews are testing grounds... it's when it's in a book that the lice seems "trapped" in that poem. (Until you come out with with a "New and Selected (Revised)")-- which even Yeats did near the end of his life!

About Me

Brian Campbell is a poet, singer-songwriter, editor, translator, photographer and teacher. His third full-length poetry collection, Shimmer Report, was published by Ekstasis Editions in 2015. He is also the author of Remnants of Autumn (Sky of Ink Press photobook, 2016), A Private Collection (Sky of Ink Press chapbook, 2014),Passenger Flight (Signature Editions, 2009), Guatemala and Other Poems (1994) and Undressing the Night (Editorial Lunes, Costa Rica, 2007), a translation of the selected poems of Francisco Santos. His poetry, reviews and essays have appeared in numerous reviews, including Saranac Review, New Quarterly, Prairie Fire, and The Rover. A finalist in the 2006 CBC Literary Award for Poetry, he is also co-founder/editor of Sky of Ink Press, which prints quality poetry chapbooks. His independent music CD, The Courtier’s Manuscript, was released in 2002.